Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 1

About This Passage

These two opening paragraphs of Anne of Green Gables introduce Mrs. Rachel Lynde through landscape, civic biography, and the geography of the only road in or out of Avonlea. Lucy Maud Montgomery uses free indirect discourse — “well-conducted,” “due regard for decency and decorum,” “the unseen gauntlet of Mrs. Rachel’s all-seeing eye” — to slip Mrs. Rachel’s judgments into the narrator’s syntax. Copying these paragraphs trains the reader to detect that technique, and to feel the bargain the novel’s prose has struck with its protagonist before any character has spoken.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 1 in five or six sentences, attending to the geographical introduction of Mrs. Rachel Lynde, the inferential drama she stages over Matthew Cuthbert’s departure, the news she extracts from Marilla, and the closing pivot toward the unnamed orphan child waiting at Bright River station.

Discussion Questions

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery opens the novel with a brook that is intricate and head-long in the Cuthbert woods but “quiet and well-conducted” once it reaches Lynde’s Hollow. Analyze how this image works as an emblem of Mrs. Rachel’s authority over Avonlea, and how it anticipates the novel’s eventual sympathy for an unconducted, intricate child.
2. Mrs. Rachel’s reading of Matthew Cuthbert’s afternoon proceeds by inference from the white collar, the buggy and sorrel mare, and the abandoned turnip seed. Examine the epistemology of village gossip the chapter is dramatizing here: what kind of knowledge does Mrs. Rachel possess, what are its conditions, and where might it fail?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide